Decpihering loanwords in Japanese can be a bit of a challenge. Today’s example is アン・ドゥ・トロワ, an-du-torowa. I don’t think I’d have gotten it if I hadn’t found a video clip of a song by that name.

I believe you have chosen the wrong word for the activity described in this headline:

Bay Bridge crews scuttle to fix span by Tuesday

[aw, they finally fixed it (the headline, that is). shame, really]

(updated with Youtube embed, which actually works…)

You’re a very cute, very busty, quite popular, just-turned-18 member of a popular idol group, with numerous sexy photobooks and DVDs to your credit, and this is how they’re advancing your career? You’re not kidding? This is not a parody trailer?

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There exists an official manga adaptation of G-On Riders. It tells basically the same story, with two key differences: full-frontal nudity and lesbian foreplay.

When I reached the hot-springs scene where Yuki and Yayoi lick melting ice cream off of Sela’s body, I had to go look it up to make sure it wasn’t a doujin parody comic. No, it’s legit, and it’s ecchi, and in the final battle, every female character in the series is completely naked.

Yes, them too.

Until recently, I hadn’t investigated the Japanese file-sharing networks. They’re Windows-only, they require some configuration that is only described in Japanese, and, of course, all of the titles are in Japanese, many marked-up with keywords that will make sense only to followers of 2ch.

I’ve already mentioned gekiyaba. There’s also お宝, which means “treasure”, but on file-sharing networks it means “special picture of a celebrity, either photoshopped or interesting only to people who can fill in the naughty bits with their imagination”. ポロリ usually means “shedding copious tears” (derived from the mimetic poro-poro), but online it’s “accidental exposure”, pictures or video clips where you can almost see down a blouse or up a skirt (so, if you go looking for Yuuko Nakazawa’s porori, you’ll find a song about crying, but for anyone else, you’ll find voyeur pics). Another one to watch out for is 激似, which means “I think the girl in this amateur porn flick looks exactly like my favorite idol, but you won’t agree”.

There are a lot of obvious keywords as well, and many people seem to apply them to every video they upload, no matter how irrelevant. Some are fairly reliable, however, like 巨乳, which means “huge breasts”. Not really my thing, but when you see a video labeled 巨乳めがねメイド after just discussing such a creature, well, it needs to be checked out. For Science!

Turns out she has the cat-ears as well… (picture safe for work)

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Are you sure you want to use this slogan on the look-but-don’t touch display model of your just-announced super-thin, ultralight laptop?

(via Engadget)

…that the Lensman novels had been translated into Japanese. Also, there’s a sequel, predictably titled Samurai Lensman. Sadly, while the author’s other book covers feature sexy ninja girls and moe demon hunters, SL’s cover restricts itself to a heroic male. While this may be in keeping with the old-fashioned spirit of the Lensman universe (modulo Clarissa and the girls), it was written in 2001, and I can’t help feeling that it’s time to infuse Doc’s classics with some modern tropes: Kyonyuu Tsundere Meganekko Catgirl Maids of the Lens.

[Update: turns out the girl on the cover is holding a big gun, and she’s a scrappy tomboy who uses it quite effectively, joining forces with Our Hero. And she’s named Cat. And she’s definitely a healthy female mammal. Not a samurai or lensman herself, though, and no sign of glasses or a maid costume, but it’s still more progress than I expected. There is a gender-ambiguous pre-teen cat-person in the story, listed as one of Cat’s younger siblings (presumably an adopted Vegian), but without actually reading the book, I can’t count that one as a loli catgirl yet.]

Oh, katakana word for the day: スペオペ.

[and this picture is just too cute for words…]

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If you’re on a Unicode-based OS, and you’re trying to read something encoded in Shift-JIS, and you’re getting errors about a small number of illegal characters that can’t be converted to Unicode in an otherwise perfectly-reasonable file, it’s not Shift-JIS, it’s CP932.

Windows Code Page 932 includes mappings for characters like 〝 and 〟, which do not exist in S-JIS.

…and that’s another hour of my life that I want back.

[Update: the luit conversion tool in X11 supports Shift-JIS only, and silently discards CP932 extensions. I’m not sure what else is available for Linux users; I just do it with a Perl one-liner.]

[oh, and there’s yet another name for this encoding: Windows-31J. And there are several other incompatible variants of Shift-JIS that require guesswork on the part of the decoder, making the continued resistance to Unicode frankly baffling. (except for not-very-smartphones, where hardware and software limits have made support for multiple encodings tricky)]